Status: 10/21/2022 5:18 p.m
Iranian teachers’ unions have denounced the violence against children following the death of a 15-year-old student in the city of Ardabil. The girl is said to have died after being beaten by security forces.
The Coordinating Council of Teachers’ Unions in Iran has sharply criticized the security forces’ violence against minors during anti-government protests. Only yesterday it became known that a 15-year-old schoolgirl was said to have been beaten by security forces in the city of Ardabil and killed. According to the Coordinating Council, Asra Panahi died on October 13 after “plainclothes officers” attacked her high school. The UN Committee on Children’s Rights said Monday that at least 23 children have been killed since the protests began.
The teachers accused the military, security forces and plainclothes police of “acting violently against schools and educational centers”. “During this systematic repression, they mercilessly took the lives of a number of students and children,” the unionists wrote. Against this background, a two-day strike will be called from Sunday. The teachers would be “present in the schools but not participate in the lessons,” the Coordinating Council wrote on Telegram. The Iranian leadership should know that Iran’s teachers “do not tolerate these atrocities and tyranny”.
Authorities speak of suicide in the Panahi case
Iranian authorities said 15-year-old Asra Panahi did not die from a beating by security forces, but rather that the girl committed suicide. The website Didban Iran quoted Ardabil MP Kasem Mousavi in a report as saying that Panahi had “committed suicide by swallowing pills”. State television broadcast an interview with the girl’s uncle, in which he said his niece died of heart failure.
However, the Coordinating Council of Teachers’ Unions reported that the students in Ardabil were taken to an “ideological event”. Some of them chanted slogans against discrimination and inequality. Security forces repeatedly beat her, even after she returned to school. Asra Panahi then died in the hospital, another student was in a coma.
Judicial authority criticizes “fake news”
The Iranian ex-soccer star and former Hertha BSC player Ali Daei, also from Ardabil, who had gotten into trouble with the authorities because of his support of the protests, reacted with outrage to the suicide thesis. Taking to Instagram, Daei wrote that he did not believe Panahi died of heart failure and dismissed the claim that she had taken her own life as a “rumour”.
In response to the post on Daei’s account, which has tens of millions of followers, the Justice Department’s website, Misan Online, dismissed his version of events as “fake news.”
Protests begin after the death of a young Kurd
The trigger for the system-critical mass protests in Iran was the death of the 22-year-old Iranian Kurd Mahsa Amini in mid-September. The moral police had arrested her because she allegedly did not comply with the mandatory rules for wearing a headscarf. The woman died in police custody on September 16.
Since Amini’s death, thousands have been demonstrating across the country against the government’s repressive course and the Islamic system of rule. The protests are led by young women and students who take off their headscarves, shout anti-government slogans and confront the security forces on the streets.